500-fold Increase in Data Flow from SETI Telescope

coondoggie brings us an article from Networkworld about a flood of new data for the SETI@home project. We discussed something similar a few months ago when a new telescope array went live. The vast amount of processing power required to handle the new data is prompting the SETI@home team to make a plea for more volunteers. Quoting the press release: "What triggered the new flow of data was the addition of seven new receivers at Arecibo, which now let the telescope record radio signals from seven regions of the sky simultaneously instead of just one. With greater sensitivity and the ability to detect the polarization of the radio signals, plus 40 times more frequency coverage, Arecibo is set to survey the sky for new radio sources."

sounds like

[Laebshade]

Sounds like a good time to re-install BOINC and start up SETI.

Re:sounds like

[Trouvist]

Yes, and I personally found it to be much much better than the BOINC system they use now.

Re:Left seti when they went to bonic

[gsn]

If they want more people to install it, they need to do something like create a RPM installer and setup a yum repository. If the installation was as simple as 'yum install bonic' plus a simple Python configure script to set the project URL, then RedHat could/would probably add it to Fedora. Which would mean that 1000's of people would see it listed in the install options, and some of them would probably give it a go.

It is on the Ubuntu box I'm sitting in front of at the moment.

gnarayan@munin|~> apt-cache search boinc
boinc-app-seti - SETI@home application for the BOINC client
boinc-client - core client for the BOINC distributed computing infrastructure
boinc-dev - development files to build applications for BOINC projects
boinc-manager - GUI to control and monitor the BOINC core client
kboincspy - monitoring utility for the BOINC client
kboincspy-dev - development files for KBoincSpy plugins

There are plenty of tools to convert debs to rpms

The other reason I left was the change in the way that stat were reported. When I started, their website showed a headline figure of number of CPU years in the last 24hrs. To me, seeing that figure increase as the project gained more users was a real incentive to add machines and contribute more to the project. It gave you the warm fuzzy feeling that we were all contributing to what was at the time one of the largest computing projects in the world.

You can still see this - login to your account (from boincmgr) and it shows you that - if anything today you get more stats - I know how many total users there are - it still is very much one of the largest computing projects in the world. I also know what the highest position I stood in the world is (if only that was my slashdot UID), where relative to my team, where relative to my country, how much credit I got from each work unit, how much credit I got on a day to day basis...

Re:are the cycles really "spare"

[Xelios]

The difference between idle and full load power use on processors nowadays is on the order of 20W (though admittedly this is more like 60W on processors like the Core 2 Duo if you have SpeedStep enabled). 50 hours at full load before you've used a kilowatt more energy. Given an average energy price of $0.13 per KWh that's a pretty small amount, on the order of $2 per month. It's still something, but to me the work done for SETI or Folding@Home is at least worth the price of a cappucino every month.

Processors are also built to run at full load, as long as it holds a good steady temperature (say 50C) you might see its lifespan decreased from 30,000 hours to 20,000 hours. What they're not built for is constant temperature cycling between load and room (off) temperature. Turning your PC off at night will likely have the same affect on its lifespan as constant load does. Again, to me at least, it's worth it. I replace the CPU every 2-3 years anyway and have yet to see one KIA.

I do think, though, that Folding@Home is a better investment than SETI. Not that I'm not curious about finding life out there, but there are more important things to do here first.

No, You're Wrong

[perspectival]

Did I say that people's spare CPU cycles should be mandated to SETI? As if that were feasible or even possible?

When I say that Protein Folding *should* take precedence over SETI, I'm simply making an appeal to people's personal priorities--and mine favor understanding and curing diseases over inconclusive alien signal-hunting every day of the week.

Yes, you're free to choose for yourself what cause you want to help out. As you should be. And I'm free to try to persuade others to help a very worthwhile cause:

http://folding.stanford.edu/ [stanford.edu]

Re:FoldingAtHome

[SETIGuy]

Protein Folding should take precedence over pointless searches for noise-in-patterns.

Distributed computing isn't an either/or proposition. Right now the BOINC infrastructure hosts at least 42 projects, and at least three of those are health related (malariacontrol.net [malariacontrol.net], rosetta@home [bakerlab.org], predictor@home [scripps.edu]). When a volunteer starts BOINC and joins a project, they are presented with a list of many projects.

If SETI@home gets the 3 to 5 fold increase in volunteers that they hope for, it's a very good bet that every other BOINC based project will see significant increases in their volunteer base.

There are certainly far more than a million internet connected CPUs that are on and idle tonight. Anyone want to guess at the actual number? 10 million? 50 million? 100 million? A few percent of those would more than do all of the jobs that are available on all of the distributed computing projects that are out there.

Re:oh I dunno

[Cassius Corodes]

While SETI just looks for aliens, it also finds abnormalities or unusual signals which then further our understanding of cosmology.

Re:oh I dunno

[HermMunster]

I used seti@home when it first came out. Ran it for a couple years. Then I had reinstalls and other issues and other priorities, so I stopped. When I decided to give them some more time I found that their new client, BOINC, was cryptic and difficult to get established so that I got credit for my prior packets. They also changed the way they calculated things. I liked it better when I completed a packet and got credit for that packet.

After having upgraded to so so many more modern computers (I must have 20 here at the shop that could help), I found that their new client bogged down my system and that often it was backed up to the point that I had packets completed but I couldn't send the results nor could I get new packets. If I was going to do it I wanted to be able to complete a packet and move on to the next with little interference from backed up servers.

So, all in all, they are very inefficient, they have servers that are bogging down, and their new client is un-optimized and causes drag on my computer, even though they say it won't.

Re:sounds like

[Almost-Retired]

Only if BOINC has learned to be a good neighbor. I took it off my machine about 2 years ago because it thought it had an unlimited right to every cycle my cpu had. Setiathome NEVER ran that piggish. The planetary folks have so far ignored all pleas to run it at about nice 20 so we could have our machines back. The old setiathome client always ran at a high niceness.

I got the plea to rejoin the effort, and told them exactly the same, no way Jose till its fixed. No reply, as if I expected one.

--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Wishing without work is like fishing without bait.
                                -- Frank Tyger

BOINC better be inobtrusive!

[Vadim Makarov]

I tried to install BOINC and could not find a way to hide the tray icon. It seems to be not running unless it displays the said icon. When I tried to install it as a service, I could not figure what username and password to supply so it doesn't fail to initialize the service (yup, I'm not a geek).

Come on, I want to install the client, configure the SETI task and settings ONCE, then forget about it completely and forever, let it run in background without reminding me of its existence, ever, period. I do NOT want my desktop cluttered by an extra tray icon. I've ditched it.

The old SETI screensaver did not display anything on the desktop while not running.

Re:sounds like

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, a few months ago, I threw a recent boinc client onto my Debian box (Kubuntu 7.10, to be more precise). It runs its crunching programs at niceness 19, which means that powernowd does not step up the CPU frequency.

This is, I think, a very good compromise between energy usage (the machine consumes 5 +/-2 Watts more energy when boinc runs) and processing power. If I stop powernowd and run boinc at the highest speed the machine can deliver (which seems to be what most participants do), power consumption rises more than 18 Watts. Of course, it is not a good idea to have the machine run longer than it would without boinc...

So, perhaps you should simply try again instead of complaining here?

Re:FoldingAtHome

[AGMW]

ET is more interesting to you until a very near relatives comes up with a serious illness like Cancer, AIDS ...

Some poster mentioned it earlier: If you priorities is to spend youd budget on the best way to save lives then research into Cancer or AIDS isn't the best place to put it, even within the medical research field. There are other diseases that kill far more people but get far less research dollars than Cancer/AIDS already! The money goes into areas where the research companies think there will be the best return on the investment!

That said, it is a fallacy to suggest that SETI might also result in a cure for all known ills by finding the aliens who already have the cures! Again, from another poster, the best thing SETI could do is offer a wake-up call to the religiously infatuated, perhaps providing some coffee flavoured smelling salts at the same time.

FWIW, I used to run SETI, before and after BOINC. I also ran a number of other BOINC [berkeley.edu] clients, including:-
SETI [berkeley.edu],
Folding [stanford.edu],
Climate Prediction [climateprediction.net],
Einstein [uwm.edu] searching for gravitational waves,
LHC [web.cern.ch] helping with the Large Hadron Collider,
Predictor [scripps.edu] trying to predict protein structure from protein sequences,
QMC [uni-muenster.de],
Rosetta [bakerlab.org],
Stardust [berkeley.edu],
yada yada yada
but removed it a year or so back as it did seem to get in the way rather too often.

BOINC was just too clunky. Why did you have to register individually with each BOINC project, be given yet another HUGE number, have to search for the interesting projects yourself. BOINC should have taken care of the registration once, then offered a drop-down of active projects. Selecting something interesting would do all the install stuff for you and allow you to control the shares from the Client - currently (or at least when I left it) if you wanted to alter the share of one particular project got you had to go to each Project's website rather than just set it within the client. Just clunky!

Anyway, I moved on, but I'd have to say I'm sort of interested again and may fire up SETI again for a while to see how things have progressed since I last offered some cycles!

Re:sounds like

[Toad-san]

Darned right! I've been offline for a while (something went wrong with my BOINC configuration). But the new install (just done) was totally painless, and I'm up and running!

I, for one, welcome our new SETI overlords!

Toad

Re:BOINC better be inobtrusive!

[Wolvie MkM]

Ahhh I see, you can probably get away with putting in a fake password for the moment then after the install is complete, go in to services (Right click My computer -> Manage, then look for Services) and find and open the BOINC service.

click the "Log On" tab, then select the "Local System Account" option, click apply, ok,etc... You can start the service now, or just reboot and let Windows do it for you.

This will have it run as "SYSTEM" instead of your local account, it's handy for me in a corporate environment where we need to change our passwords now and then.

But I'd highly suggest that you put a password on your account just as a common sense security measure! :)

Hope that points you in the right direction!

Re:sounds like

[SETIGuy]

Informative? BOINC has always run applications at nice 19 on unix and at low priority on windows. It also has the option of watching every tty and the mouse for input in order to stop processing if anyone is in an interactive session. The parent poster has no idea what they are talking about.